ISIS, British girls, British boys, and the double standard around grooming and victimhood:

The press coverage surrounding the three girls from East London who have reportedly gone to Syria to join ISIS has been as interesting as it has been infuriating. It has shown a gendered double-standard, which I think repackages this story as a simple ‘abducted-girl’ narrative, and dodges larger, more difficult questions surrounding British citizens joining ISIS.

It’s pretty well established that stories about missing or murdered girls gain far more press coverage than those about boys. But what was interesting about the specifics of this case of East London girls — aged 15 and 16 — fleeing the UK, apparently for ISIS, was the press’ frequent reference to these girls being ‘groomed’. It’s a term loaded with connotations of sexual abuse, and makes this case seem like a rather simple one in which the evil Islamic State manipulate innocents into joining them.

The grooming narrative focuses on one aspect of this tale — that these girls are to become jihadi brides — which is rightly concerned with the fact that these girls may well find themselves drawn into sexual slavery, at the hands of ISIS’s fighters. But there are broader, ideological questions surrounding this subject, which are ignored because of their thorniness. Yes, a 15 year old girl is unable to consent to marriage, but is a 15 year old girl unable to want to abandon Britain, and join Islamic State? She may not have reached the age of majority, but pledging allegiance to an ideological movement is not a legal issue.

The more important issue goes beyond these three girls, and encompasses the hundreds of British Muslims — of whom the majority are young men — who decided, after growing up in the UK, and being educated in British schools, that their true purpose lies in the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. The mainstream response has been superficial, and gendered in broad strokes: the young men who travel are violent thugs, who want to wield assault rifles and own a harem; whilst the young women are victims of grooming, brainwashed into sexual slavery. It’s a distinction which doesn't really make sense, especially as it’s highly likely that the male and female ISIS recruits from Britain and Europe have been exposed to near identical ISIS media. Either both have been groomed, or neither have. To suggest otherwise demonises these men as psychopaths alone, and robs women of their agency, and capacity to make decisions. Whilst a 15 year old girl, younger than the ages of consent and marriage, may legally be a victim, can we say the same of her 16 year old contemporaries, and the other older women who are of consenting age, and have decided to become subservient wives to the daesh?

Focusing on grooming, in the case of girls, and hypermasculine, psychopathic tendencies, in the case of boys, ignores the deeper issue regarding British citizens joining ISIS. The deeper is question is: why do they see no future for them in their home country? Why are they detached from Britain, the nation in which they were raised and educated, and hate it? The people joining ISIS from the UK don’t fit the standard terrorist demographic mould: they are on the whole not poor, from broken homes, or petty criminals (this is a different matter in France, however). The three girls from East London were at the top of their classes in school; many of the young men who have fled the UK come from comfortable, well-integrated, middle class Muslim families (often from High Wycombe, strangely), with excellent academic records and glowing career prospects ahead of them. It would be too simplistic to rely on ‘Islamic extremism’ as an answer, and blame mosques for preaching hatred, and Islam in general. A Caliphate hasn’t existed for nearly a century; the parents of the teenagers and twentysomethings who have joined ISIS have — on the whole — built their lives in Britain, and feel vested in this country, and are consequently, much more religiously liberal than their children, and indeed went to the same mosques as their radicalised children.

What does the West mean nowadays?

The larger issue that this points to is the erosion of self-confidence in Western liberal democracy. After the embarrassing failure of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, guilt following the ugly end of European empires, and the growing balkanization of society by the divisive forces of identity politics, there are few voices successfully uniting classes, genders, races and creeds under universal, liberal banners. If the UK is to be nothing but a jobs market, then it should be of no surprise to us that confident, simple and pure narratives and ideologies will seem increasingly attractive to young people who can’t really work out what Britain stands for, what it really means, and why it is a better alternative to Islamic State. I’m willing to bet that ISIS know this. They have enough British recruits, after all. Their propaganda videos aren’t just designed to preach to the choir, but to take part in the battle of ideas which rages in the west. With beheading montages filmed in high-definition slow-motion, including impressive CGI sequences, and grisly sound effects, ISIS’s propaganda videos mimic the style of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and fill them with real violence, to excite bored western minds.

Articulating a positive narrative of what it means to be British, and what Britain stands for uniquely, is no easy task. It isn’t a nation founded on an existential struggle, with a constitution — like those of France and the USA — to be waved like a banner. Britain is an incremental nation, rather than one guided by core principles; and, in the last 70 years, it has had an uneasy relationship with itself and its history. What seems to be needed is a compelling idea which stands above our private, biological, and religious identities. Voltaire articulated a version of this in his letters on English religious tolerance. In the most famous passage from Philosophical Letters, Voltaire observed:

“Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.”

Perhaps commerce may not unify people today as it did in Voltaire’s eyes, but it was held up at the London Stock Exchange as something universal, above discrete identities and pursuits, and appealed to a peaceful human unity, rather than violent division. That 18th century England was actually still a land split by religious discrimination — most notably against Catholics — need not matter. Voltaire’s image of the Stock Exchange presents us with an idea that powerful, positive forces can unite people, and let them put aside their relationships with God, and think beyond any particular biological distinction.

However, if the politics of identity are to continue their grip on our discourse, which stress the importance of one’s race, religion, sexuality and gender above all else, then the rejection of Martin Luther King’s plea for a society in which the ‘content of character’ determined relationships above all will be complete, and we will see yet more division and balkanization. The idea of Britain today need not just be commerce or trade, but it must be something which positively unites its rainbow of citizens, rather than allowing each stripe to turn its own colour against the others. I believe this is the biggest challege facing liberal Western societies today; if a rainbow nation is worth achieving, we must see that liberal democracy wins the battle of ideas, rather than allowing further biological division and imprisonment.